If you’re a middle-aged white guy with a university degree, chances are you’re making a pretty decent living. Indeed, folks like you typically make more than $90,000 a year, according to Statistics Canada. That’s well above the national average of just $49,351 and higher than any other demographic group in the country.

On Thursday, I published an online calculator on my blog that lets you see how much money people just like you make. Punch in your gender, age, education and ethnicity and the calculator shows you the median income for people who share your characteristics.

The calculator has proven quite popular, with many people having fun seeing how their own income compares to people like them. Many have also found the calculator an interesting way to highlight some of the inequities that exist in our society: How men make more than women, whites more than non-whites and older people more than young people.

If you fiddle around with the calculator long enough, you can see which demographic groups are blessed with high incomes. But I thought, for people interested in making these comparisons, it might be easier to look at a ranked list. So — using the same data that powers the online calculator — I made the interactive below:

As the chart shows, university-educated white guys aged 45 to 64 dominate the rankings, though middle-aged Japanese folks with a degree crack the Top 3. My own personal category — university educated white guys between 35 and 44 — comes in sixth.

On the flip side, Arab women aged 15 to 24 with no high-school diploma are dead last at $11,309. Though that last category has only 70 people in it, so you should treat it with caution. You can see how many people are in any category by hovering over the bar chart.

By using the filters on the top of the ranked list, you can also get a better sense of the impact of particular characteristics on your pay. For example, if I plug in my age, gender and ethnicity, I can see in stark terms just how big of a difference education alone makes:

Have fun playing with the ranked list above and, when you’re done, be sure to go check out our online calculator if you haven’t already.

Two final notes about the data.

Someone on my last post asked why Aboriginals aren’t included in the ethnicity drop-down list. That’s a really good question. It has to do with how StatsCan asks questions on its National Household Survey and how it makes its data available. If you look at the NHS questionnaire, you’ll see that people are asked separately for their Aboriginal status and their visible minority status. In other words, “Aboriginal” isn’t treated as a type of visible minority. Also, the data table I used to construct both the online calculator and the ranked list above lists Aboriginal status and visible minority status on the same page. That means I had to choose one or the other to use in the calculations. I chose visible minority for two reasons: It covers more categories and the NHS’s Aboriginal data has been problematic because of low response rates on reserves.

Because Aboriginal status and visible minority status are two separate questions, I also couldn’t just combine the two into one category. For example, for the purposes of the NHS, someone can be both “black” and “Aboriginal” (and, indeed, someone with both African and native heritage would probably identify themselves as such). That said, you can look at the original data table yourself and see, not surprisingly, that Aboriginal people’s incomes are lower than the Canadian average. Though perhaps not as low as you might think (which could be due to the low-response rates): $40,078 for Aboriginals compared to $49,577 for non-Aboriginals.

The final point is a quick shout out to Heather Wylie, a regional adviser with Statistics Canada here in Vancouver. During the many NHS data releases over the past few months, Heather, and her StatsCan colleague Ashok Mathur, have been immensely helpful in pointing me to the right data tables on their website, running custom data requests for me and patiently answering my many (many!) questions about what certain terms mean. Thanks guys!

To get your nerd on even more, Cam Stark has built an interesting chart using this data to compare the distribution of median and average earnings for men and women. The data seems to suggest that male incomes are more heavily skewed than those of women. In other words, in each category there are a handful of very high male earners who pull up the average for everyone else. My charts have been using median incomes, which aren’t as susceptible to the influence of just a few high earners.

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